Before the sky falls: Who killed Alexander Litvinenko?

Nov 12, 2012

Alexander Korobko

Drawing by Sergei Yolkin

The media seems to be getting M.I. High, like in the BBC TV children's spy-fi adventure series of the same name. Now, even The Daily Mail asks, in a recent headline, if Alexander Litvinenko was killed ‘by British spooks’. Do they really mean MI6?

It's the same moral frivolity
and ease with which, just a few years ago, it was suggested that ‘Russian
spooks’ were involved. Well, although one may say it would suit my fellow
Russians to pin the Litvinenko murder on MI6, I am relieved to see that no such
conspiracy theories find much support - either in Russian officialdom or
among the Russian public.

Watching the film Skyfall just a few days ago, I couldn't
help but recall SPECTRE (SPecial Executive for Counter-intelligence,
Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion), a fictional global terrorist
organisation featured in the older James Bond movies. So, while
SPECTRE has vanished from the recent Bond films, it apparently hasn't – so
far – from the international arena, albeit it may not have the same name. The
elements of Ian Fleming's SPECTRE can be recognised in such mafia
syndicates as various gangster rings, the Sicilian Mafia, the ‘Unione Corse’ of
France, the Chinese Triads, the Japanese "Yakuza" and the
Mafia from the former Soviet Union, particularly the Georgian Mafia.

The role and scope of the
latter, until recently, remained unknown. In order to understand it better, we
have to cite the book about the oligarch Boris Berezovsky, written by
the American journalist of Russian descent, Paul Khlebnikov. In 1993 ‘out of
sixty thieves professing-the-code (the closest equivalent to the godfather of the
Sicilian and American mafia)’, Khlebnikov wrote, ‘more than half were from the Republic of Georgia’.

Khlebnikov tells us that the Georgian Badri
Patarkatsishvili, one of the co-founders of the car dealer LogoVaz, was
Berezovsky’s link to that Mafia underworld.

Klebnikov himself was murdered,
then Patarkatsishvili died in the UK in suspicious circumstances. Then
there was the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya – to name but a few.

It has also been claimed that
the death of Litvinenko was connected to Berezovsky. Former FSB chief Nikolay
Kovalyov, for whom Litvinenko worked, said that the incident ‘looks like [the]
hand of Berezovsky. I am sure that no kind of intelligence services
participated’.

We can only guess at what
‘underworld’ powers, influences and characters are at work in London and
elsewhere at this very moment. Suddenly, the whole world feels like "a
riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”. What about Mario Scaramella,
who had a meeting with Litvinenko in the "Itsu" sushi bar before the
latter met Lugovoy in the "Millenium" hotel? Scaramella, tested
positive for polonium in a London hospital, was once reported to have had
enough radiation in his body to die a few times over, and yet so far ... hasn't
lost his hair, his life or his vigour. Can this "Don Corleone" turn
to them "spooks", who "don't respect nothin'"? Does he have
"intel" one can't refute?

It is reported that the candidate
for the post of Prime Minister of Georgia, Bidzina Ivanishvili, said that the
war in South Ossetia in 2008 was initiated by
the Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili. ‘Saakashvili and I - we are on the
same side", Berezovsky told the Georgian magazine ‘Tabula’. What he means,
and what other secrets he possesses (perhaps shared only with his now deceased
confidant, Badri Patarkatsishvily), can only be deciphered by the very ‘spooks’
from MI6 and the FSB who themselves can become an easy target in the webs of
trickery and deception created by the powerful figures of the underworld.

We do know that Russia, like the UK
and the US,
has its own arch-enemies in the form of terrorists and criminal
masterminds, the ‘Moriartys’ of our time. Conan Doyle based his
Professor Moriarty on the American astronomer Simon Newcomb. Newcomb
was revered as an evil genius, with a special mastery of mathematics, and
he earned a reputation for nastiness and malice, seeking to destroy
the careers and reputations of rival scientists.

Quite a few of those could
measure up to Newcomb's ‘talents’ among Putin's enemies. Instead of
sensationalist ‘spy-fi’, trying to pin the terrible crime on British,
Russian or ‘you-name-it’ ‘spies’, the media should look into international
organised crime. But the latter is more likely to sue, taking advantage of the UK libel law,
so ... MI6 or FSB, Putin, Cameron, Blair or Bush (the favourites among the
conspiracy theorists) become far easier targets for the media.

Perhaps, MI6 and the FSB (who
are now considered as "interested parties" in the Litvinenko inquest) should
take clues from Ian Fleming's James Bond. He out-smarted SPECTRE’s efforts to
instigate a conflict between the East and the West, hoping
that MI6 and the KGB would exhaust themselves, and the superpowers become
vulnerable.

So, should ‘M’ give KGB chief
‘General Gogol’ a call? Perhaps it's about time – before the sky falls on both.
After all, if polonium (actually part of the trigger for the bomb that fell on
Nagasaki) ended up in SPECTRE's hands, we will need the ‘spooks’ and the
police on both sides to put their heads together. Please, the sooner the better.